Scroll down to read this post.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands. Instead, I depend entirely on my readers to support me. Though this means I am sacrificing some income, it also means that I remain entirely independent from outside pressure. By depending solely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, no one can threaten me with censorship. You don't like what I write, you can simply go elsewhere.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
 

3. A Paypal Donation:

4. A Paypal subscription:


5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.


Obama: all religions the same

At his speech today at the National Prayer Breakfast President Obama outlined the moral equivalency between Islam and all other religions, noting that all religions have in the past been “hijacked” by evil people for “for their own murderous ends.”

This is an interesting intellectual argument that is completely meaningless in today’s world. The problem today is not Christian murderers or Jewish murderers or Buddhist murderers. It is Islamic murderers, supported by an Islamic population willing to condone violence in the name of their religion.

You don’t believe me? Then compare the large number of demonstrations in the Islamic world protesting the publication of cartoon drawings of Mohammed by Charlie Hebdo versus the complete lack of outrage in those same places for the burning alive of one prisoner and the beheading of others by the Islamic State. Even if Obama is right, which I do not believe, Islam today is murderous and running amok. We must deal with that reality, not the ivory tower delusions of college professors and incompetent Presidents living in the past.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

11 comments

  • wodun

    Obama also subscribes to a historical view of Christians that is not accurate. While there were atrocities during the Crusades, by all sides, the Crusades themselves were not an atrocity but rather a response to, and this is a shocker, Muslim conquest and establishment of caliphates in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

  • Tom Billings

    It is rather worse than you state it. Even though it *is* correct that Islam was hijacked, it was hijacked from the equivalent of the first conquest activity after Mohammed died. The Caliph started demanding compilation of what the Sunnah remembered Mohammed had said, even as they were engaged in conquering the imperial Caliphate, and justifying its conquest. It is no surprise that they remembered everything he might have said, at any time, about conquest in an Arabia still swarming with hostile politics. Equally, it is no surprise that all his more peaceful earlier statements were subordinated to his more bellicose statements later. That made the whole more useful to the imperial Caliphate.

    By contrast, Christianity had 270 years of writing, thinking, organizing, and missionary work before it was captured for the Empire by Constantine. This means that Islam’s sacred scriptures are far more directly tied to conquest as a good thing than are Christianity’s. Thus, the work needed to untangle the bias towards conquest will be harder for them, and take longer.

    Worse yet, the imperial subjection of Islam’s scriptures is less than 100 years in the past. Christianity made its decisive break with imperial subjection 367 years ago, when the Treaty of Westphalia declared “Ius regio, …Ius religio” (whoever rules a state, his religion). Even though the Calipha line was laid to rest in 1924, empire builders have sought to revive it from no later than 1928, with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    *Every* Muslim group assailing industrial society around the world have reviving the Caliphate as an imperial State at the core of their principles. Al Sisi has grasped the nettle in calling for reform. Even some of the Saudi Arabian clerisy’s highest members have denounced Deash (or IS as they demand to be called, other than “The Caliphate”) for outright imperialism.

    I heard no excert where Obama was ever willing to explain this, or back a stance of true anti-imperialism. He is still too invested with the idea that only the members of industrial society that used to have empires can be accused of imperialsm.

  • Cotour

    Obama, moral literalist. Chooses to see reality only through his own lens, no matter what.

  • Pzatchok

    Mohamed went on 27 conquests of his own. All in the name of Allah.

    By the way, before Mohamed came along the Arab tribes believed in MANY gods, over one hundred. Al-Allah was just the name of the greatest.
    Mohamed took that name for his Gods name in order to make the conversions easier. Al-Allah became Allah.

    Islam was created to unite the Arabs under one God. Thus under one set of rules. Thus under one leader.

    It was created to copy what the early Christians were doing. Uniting under one God. And if not totally united at least not openly warring against each other all the time.
    He watched the Roman empire becoming more and more Christian and wanted something like it for his people. As the Roman empire fell it became more and more Christian, at the same time it shrank allowing the rise of Islam in the middle east.
    Mohamed just showed the way and established the first caliphate, All the succeeding rulers just expanded on his work.

    It was NEVER established as a religion of peace and it has never been through a reformation changing itself into one.

  • PeterF

    I just wish the media would stop calling them Radical Islamists and call them what they really are Fundamentalist Islamists. They fight the way Mohamed fought.
    Ghengis Khan would have all the men in a village that resisted killed and all the women raped as an example so that the next villages would surrender without a fight and not suffer the same fate.
    The fundamentalist ISIS (or Boko Haram or etc. etc. etc.) don’t seem to draw a distinction between how they take a village. It appears they revel in the muder and rape of any population that they conquer.

  • Edward

    This guy is really pissing me off.

    Instead of bragging in his autobiographies about spending his time toking with his chum gang, he should have bragged about his Civics and History classes, through which he obviously slept. What knowledge is important for the US President to have? For someone who is supposedly so smart, he displays ignorance with virtually every speech.

    Most religions have gotten religion in the past half millennium (with one notable exception, but since Obama could not bring himself to name it, maybe I shouldn’t either), but he does not acknowledge such advancement – to him, once guilty of sin, always guilty of sin. Using the phrase “high horse” tells us that he considers Christianity — and its modern followers — to be just as bad as the religion he doesn’t name, that we are not allowed to criticize, for we Americans are just as sinful and guilty. He actively removes our ability to complain against such atrocities.

    If we may not criticize it, then we cannot be against it — we must accept it.

    Obama was said to have “evolved” in his views on gay marriage, but Christianity does is not allowed to be “saved” in the same way. It is as though only Obama can improve himself, come to realize the errors of his past, and become a better person, but Christianity remains guilty of any and all past sins and trespasses, no atonement is possible, no apology is good enough.

    He is inconsistent in his preaching, too: he told Putin that wars for conquest are no longer acceptable, in the 21st century, but he accepts immolation because it had been accepted in previous centuries.

    He paints a broad brush, blaming abolitionists – who *did* fight slavery in the name of Christ – as though they were as guilty about slavery as the slave owners. So much for his sense of fairness.

    He ignores that Americans chose to shed our own blood in order to free slaves from a system of slavery that the King — the one that was so bad that we fought another war to free ourselves from him — had so deeply ingrained into our economy, culture, and laws that it turned out to be impossible to end it, as many of the Founding Fathers intended. This is evidenced by the South seceding rather than allowing Lincoln to end it by legal and constitutional means.

    Slavery was once so accepted that only the unpopulated Antarctic is the only land on the planet where is was never an acceptable practice. Most of the world has actively outlawed the practice. Yet to criticize anywhere that it continues is to get on a high horse.

    Which religion stones women to death? Which bible has its central figure say, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her”? Which religion hangs gays or throws them from rooftops, which one continues to advocate slavery, and which one preaches forgiveness? There is no moral equivalence to be had.

    How Christian is he if he does not understand the forgiving ways of his own faith? He does not forgive the Crusades, Slavery, the Inquisition, or Jim Crow laws but instead uses these ancient sins to excuse a certain religion’s modern atrocities. Perhaps he should have paid attention to his bible studies. I wonder if he can recite the Lord’s Prayer.

    And the worst of all: the Jim Crow laws were enacted by *his* party and only in certain states, not the whole United States, so the blame for them lies not in Christ or the US. Maybe he should have paid attention to his Harvard Law classes, too, instead of climbing into vans for another toke.

  • Edward,

    If you really want to understand Obama’s speech at the National Prayer breakfast, you should read this story by one of the Muslim leaders who met with Obama at the White House just prior to Obama’s appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast.

    From this story, it is very clear that Obama’s speech was essentially regurgitating the talking points fed to him by these Muslim leaders, who were apparently more outraged by minor verbal insults of conservatives hostile to Islam than by the savage barbarism taking over Islam in the Middle East. Obama very obviously did not challenge them in any way, and ended up taking their side in his speech the next day.

    Increasingly, I must wonder whose side Obama is really on.

  • Cotour

    “Instead of bragging in his autobiographies about spending his time toking with his chum gang, he should have bragged about his Civics and History classes, through which he obviously slept.”

    Your inability or resistance to not understand our presidents perspective is interesting to me, you keep expecting him to have your American perspective but he has a more international / Marxist / Islamic perspective. Your conclusion about his not understanding his civics lessons is exactly 180 degrees from what he has accomplished in his education. He understands it perfectly, he has studied the Constitution and knows exactly how far he can push it in his attempt to break it which IMO is his goal.

    You may want to check with a mental health professional (an Edward sarcasm alert), you seem to be stuck within the Einstein insanity definition parameters, someone who keeps doing, in this case thinking in the same way, getting the same results but expects a different result. He is what he is, expect nothing other than that, kill your hope that he will have a come to Jesus (he is a Christian you know, so he says) moment and relent in his un American agenda. This is fundamental change!

    Our president is a most un American president, these are the consequences to elections where the push back to one incompetent squared results in an equal and opposite reaction cubed.

  • Cotour

    Diminish America both financially and militarily and by doing so achieve “equality” in the world. This is the presidents crazy assed way of thinking about America and its over abundance of power.

    Whenever someone is willing to intellectually trade away their power (and everything is about power) the vacuum that is created by reality will soon be filled by what it is that you they thought they were far above, in this case stability in the world as a result of American power and leadership. Keeping in mind that American power just like all power can, will and is being perverted on an ongoing basis, that is the nature of power. But given a choice I choose American abuse of power to all others.

    IMO, and this will be another another counter intuitive moment for you, is a continuing of the Papa Bush One World Government agenda that was in their own way contributed to by each succeeding president, Obama just being the latest. The OWG can not be achieved with America as strong as it once was. Better to diminish and dilute it than make the rest of the world adopt the American Constitution. Too, Too much personal freedom and individual financial power for those who seek control. Sounds paranoid but think about what has gone on in the last 30 years.

  • Edward

    Robert wrote: “Increasingly, I must wonder whose side Obama is really on.”

    I stopped wondering long ago.

    Meanwhile, Robert, your linked author mentioned anti-Muslim bigotry. Here is the definition:
    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bigotry?s=t
    “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.”

    Considering that he thinks that it is only his creed, belief, and opinions that are not being tolerated (he even mentions that Republicans do not make “racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic remarks” – but then again, there are people of all races, religions, and sexual preferences/gender identities in the Republican party, and they are welcome there), he has used the wrong word. Considering that he is intolerant of anything Republican (and Islam is intolerant of anything not Islamic), it is clear that he has projected his own opinion onto them. Who is the bigot? After that meeting, the expressed intolerance for Christianity makes that question even more meaningful.

    That Obama is so easily persuaded demonstrates that my question about how Christian he really is turns out to be more appropriate than I thought. If he were secure in his beliefs, he would not easily turn against them. Thus we could conclude that his beliefs are not what is generally believed.

    Cotour wrote: “you keep expecting him to have your American perspective”

    I don’t know what I wrote to give you that impression. I thought that I was rather explicit when I said that he didn’t pay enough attention to Civics, History, or Law. Maybe the part about the importance of knowing those in order to be president was not so clear. I need to do better with my writing/communications skills.

    No, Cotour, I do not expect him to have my patriotic point of view, but a good president would be patriotic. A bad president would run up our debt, lose wars that we had already won (known as “losing the peace,” a concept understood by the time of the fall of the Third Reich, and maybe earlier), ignore the Constitution to rule as though he was Dictator of the United States, and fundamentally transform our culture, work ethic, economic system, and governance – as well as degrade our military, determine how we are to spend our own hard-earned money, and ruling by fiat as well as through administrative rules and regulations rather than Constitutionally sanctioned laws. I have been of the following opinion for a long time, and it is clear that this is the philosophy that Obama *is* secure in:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWi182CMJY8

    Cotour also wrote: “He understands [his civics lessons] perfectly, he has studied the Constitution and knows exactly how far he can push it in his attempt to break it”

    I don’t think that he needs to understand American Civics or History lessons or the Constitution at all. All he needs to know is that Congress will not impeach, no matter what he does, and how far and fast he can go without the military deciding that a military coup is the only way to protect the Constitution, which they vowed to protect (a move that would destroy the Constitution, if done improperly). Can you name me the last action that Obama took that was consistent with the Constitution? [Rhetorical question alert, but if you know of one, feel free to answer.]

    The press, whose job in a free society is to present the truth over the lies that come from government, is in favor of tyranny rather than freedom, repeating virtually everything that Obama wants them to tell us. They probably think that they will be admired by Obama and future tyrants, but history shows that tyrants treat the press poorly – and treat them worse if they step out of line (as has happened to members of the US press).

    Let’s stipulate that he is not un-American (although both of us already disagreed with this position); if he wanted to destroy this country, what would he do different?

    Cotour wrote, “Whenever someone is willing to intellectually trade away their power …”

    Isn’t this what Benjamin Franklin warned us about? He who would trade liberty for security …

    Finally, Cotour wrote, “in this case thinking in the same way, getting the same results but expects a different result.”

    I believe that it is not insanity to think patriotically, and my writings are complaints about how poorly Obama treats this great nation and her people. Perhaps some think that is “crazy talk,” but I disagree. I do not expect Obama to change his ways or that Congress will suddenly become patriotic, nor do I expect a military coup to save this nation from him, Congress, and the Supreme Court (which, through their (mis)interpretations of the Constitution, has chosen a tyrannical government over a free people).

    In fact, I expect two years (or more) of further degradation into tyranny followed by decades or centuries of struggle to regain the freedoms that we enjoyed as we grew up. Now, *that* may be crazy talk, in that we may not get a future chance to struggle for freedom.

    As I said, this president really pisses me off.

  • Cotour

    And so we will all be pissed off for the next 22 and 1/2 months.

    Wait until the last 6 months, lets see if we can predict what is to be:

    1.We should see the mass release of prisoners from federal prisons with pardons that are being secretly written right now, (accent on differently colored). Eric Holder is an expert at this, he is the attorney who delivered Mark Rich his well earned pardon.

    2. Of course Iran reaches a secret agreement with the administration and achieves nuclear weapons grade material capability and soon combines it with their satellite capability. Rest easy, the world is now safe, everyone is now “equal” by the Obama standard.

    3. More forced mass firings of top military personnel.

    4. Some form of financial manipulation by the White House (like 8 trillion dollars in additional debt is not enough) to further burden the country for generations.

    5. The proposing a combined North American passport for Mexico / The United States / Canada and the elimination of the United States passport? no one needs those inhospitable borders.

    6. Al Sharpton nominated to the Supreme court to replace Ginsberg who just shrinks and disappears one day, no one knows where she went, all they find is her black robe. (just kidding)

    7. Obama invites 10,000 prominent Muslims from around the world to the White House grounds to join him in his daily prayers to Mecca as he rolls out the secret prayer rug he keeps in the Oval Office closet?

    8. The 12 sorties a day (if we were serious shouldn’t it be about 200 sorties a day?) against ISIS will be reduced to 0 sorties and those sorties will be replaced with C130 ammunition drops.

    This is fun, lets see what other delights we can come up with that Obama may have in store for the country in the coming months.

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

No registration is required. I welcome all opinions, even those that strongly criticize my commentary.

 

However, name-calling and obscenities will not be tolerated. First time offenders who are new to the site will be warned. Second time offenders or first time offenders who have been here awhile will be suspended for a week. After that, I will ban you. Period.

 

Note also that first time commenters as well as any comment with more than one link will be placed in moderation for my approval. Be patient, I will get to it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *